Aha.. my old friends, but this time under the presumably assumed name of "John Kennedy". (JFK? Does Elvis work there too?)

There's a new twist though, they are also sending out "overdue" notices to sites and saying within Topsites.us that the payment is overdue on the public site of the directory. Needless to say it's all BS, but I suspect there next step might be barratry.

I notice that if you search Google for info on this organisation, that one of our WebmasterWorld members has a boatload of good information.

I was thinking about this (err rather too much I guess) and I realised that this was really a new take on an old scam, the "fax directory scam" which has been around since the 1980s.

Just like the Nigerian 419 emails have been around for decades, but only in letter and fax form, the Topsites approach simply spins out an old practice.

The other new thing is that they no longer spam listings from the ODP, they just go through domains presumably from DNS data, a little like Trafficmagnet. This really does make it a straight scam, because with the "original" Topsites approach, you were actually *listed* in Topsites, even though you hadn't chosen to be. With this approach, the sites *aren't* necessarily listed in the ODP and the "renewal" pitch is simply fraudulent.

Well, I know of more than one victim who's considering legal action, and I think it's a question of "watch this space".

Yes, I enjoyed reading your detailed exposee on TopSites. Its very handy for sending to clients who find the "renewal notices" plausible, if not downright compelling.

As I put in my first post, they seem to have been quiet for a few months (maybe they just didn't come my way then). Based on January/February this year, I woiuld expect to get a bucketful of these new renewal notices in the next two weeks

You seem to have had a continuing "relationship" with the organisation ;)

Sheesh, i'm slow on the uptake today. I only just made the connection between "one of our WebmasterWorld members has a boatload of good information", the url I posted and good old Dynamoo. Duh ;) But great info anyway Dynamoo :)

They've been pretty busy actually. One think I'd like to do is chart the spam reports against the Alexa rankings they're so proud of.

Do a search for them in Google Groups and you'll get a feeling for the extent of the spam. On really busy spamming days, their Alexa rank shoots up - I think this is because of remote loading of web pages perhaps? I have all that stuff turned off in mine :)

I guess they're busy spamming even more because having the four of them squeezed together in the $700,000 ranch-style house in the woods in Cupertino (possibly with a pool) is getting them down.

Nigerian scams have been going on for several years now. People are still falling for it, paying several hundreds $ to "speed up things" hoping to get a non-existant 20% of a non-existant N-million-$ sum to be transfered into their account.

Not surprising that there's still someone falling into the Topsites scam, paying 5$ hoping to get a non-existant million visitors from a link in a non-existant-PR clone of the ODP (which BTW doesn't even comply with the Netscape License for using its data) when they already have, or can have it, for free.

Probably they're the same people who fall for the FullPromote/TrafficMagnet/WhateverNewIncarnation "we will submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month"...

Actually cornwall, rafalk's hypothesis C is more or less the same as your hypothesis A. AOL/TW has tons of money available to sue Topsites. That they don't sue means that their position is basically that while they don't like others using their data improperly, they've decided that if somebody does so they aren't going to do anything serious about it.

Actually, although Topsites is violating the license, it doing so in a more "legally difficult" way than other violators I can think of. I actually don't want to go into the specifics of the violations here, other than the ones I mention on the website, because I don't want to help them out any if AOLTW do come knocking.

But the issue isn't the ODP license violation, it's the "renewal" scam. And to that end it would be *nice* if AOLTW sued their asses off, but really it seems to be to be a legal matter involving the proper authorities.